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When a Catholic Terrified the Heartland

Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special CollectionsThese images appeared during the 1928 Hoover-Smith campaign. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Orange, Calif.

WITH Mitt Romney, a member of the Mormon church, quite possibly heading toward the Republican nomination, Americans may be faced with a presidential aspirant whose faith many find strange and troublesome. It would not be the first time that has happened, and during a previous campaign the response was pretty nasty.

By any measure, Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic candidate against Herbert C. Hoover in 1928, had a formidable record. Growing up poor, Al (as everyone except The New York Times called him) left school at age 12 to go to work, at jobs that included a stint in the Fulton Fish Market.

An outgoing lad with a fine speaking voice, he gravitated to street corner politics and on to Tammany Hall. Smith started as an unknown member of the New York State Assembly and rose to become speaker. In 1911, he led the investigation of the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire and sponsored the subsequent reform legislation that influenced fire codes nationwide.

Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections CLICK TO ENLARGE.

Like Mr. Romney, Smith was the governor of a northeastern state. He served four nonconsecutive terms beginning in 1919, and a good argument can be made that Al was the greatest chief executive in the history of New York State, where he created the precursor of the New Deal.

So Smith should have been an impressive candidate, but the electorate had several problems with him. Voters reacted to his equivocal stance on Prohibition, to his Irish heritage, even to his New York roots. Their foremost objection by far, however, was to his religion: Smith was a devout Roman Catholic.

The response to this belief was public and private, during a campaign that lasted only two months, from September to November. Yet feelings were so strong that they swirled into a hurricane of abuse, a crescendo of fear and hate blasting through eight weeks. The school board of Daytona Beach, Fla., sent a note home with every student. It read simply: “We must prevent the election of Alfred E. Smith to the Presidency. If he is elected President, you will not be allowed to have or read a Bible.” Fliers informed voters that if Smith took the White House, all Protestant marriages would be annulled, their offspring rendered illegitimate on the spot.

Opponents blanketed the country with photos of the recently completed Holland Tunnel, the caption stating that this was the secret passage being built between Rome and Washington, to transport the pope to his new abode. Countless copies of a small cartoon appeared on lampposts and mailboxes everywhere. Titled “Cabinet Meeting — If Al Were President,” it showed the cabinet room, with the pope seated at the head of the table, surrounded by priests and bishops. Over in the corner was Al Smith, dressed in a bellboy’s uniform, carrying a serving platter, on top of which was a jug of whiskey. Summing up, the minister of the largest Baptist congregation in Oklahoma City announced, “If you vote for Al Smith you’re voting against Christ and you’ll all be damned.”

Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections

The Ku Klux Klan became actively involved in preventing a Catholic from ever getting near the White House, going all out to defeat Smith. One Klan leader mailed thousands of postcards after Democrats nominated the New Yorker, stating firmly, “We now face the darkest hour in American history. In a convention ruled by political Romanism, anti-Christ has won.” A Klan colleague in remote North Manchester, Ind., warned his audience, in booming tones, of the imminent arrival of the pope: “He may even be on the northbound train tomorrow! He may! He may! Be warned! America is for Americans! Watch the trains!” When I interviewed Hugh L. Carey, only the second Roman Catholic elected governor of New York, for my Smith biography, he remembered Klan parades in Hicksville when he was 9 years old and how frightened he was, because “there was a real anti-Catholic sentiment.”

At least as nefarious were the private conversations, whisperings that went on in homes, workplaces and schools across America. One woman wrote Franklin D. Roosevelt that she had heard that “if Governor Smith is elected president, the pope’s son will be his secretary.” F.D.R. asked, in his reply, how many sons did the lady think the pope had, and what were their occupations? Down in Amarillo, Tex., Representative Marvin Jones, a good Democrat, went into his local drugstore, and the owner asked him whom he was going to vote for. Mr. Jones answered with Smith’s name. His neighbor bluntly replied, “We’ve been fighting that bunch for 2,000 years. Do you think I’m going to turn the government over to them?”

Simon Rifkind, at the time I spoke with him, was one of the last people alive to have actually been on the Smith campaign train. He noted that, when he was growing up in New York City, Catholics were all around him (Mr. Rifkind was Jewish), and “I had not been aware of the intense anti-Catholicism that prevailed in this country.” But that year, “when I came to mid-America,” he said, “it hit you in the face.” Explaining that Smith would sometimes “be boycotted because he was a Catholic,” Mr. Rifkind went on, “There were some times when nobody showed up at the platform.” In Kansas, a little girl came home and asked, “Mama, why don’t they kill that bad man Smith that they told us about in Sunday school?”

Even experienced political figures were stunned. Frances Perkins, later the first female cabinet member, campaigning for Smith in Maryland, founded as a Catholic refuge, still faced what she described as “some of the most terrible fantastic prejudices and dreadful yarns I have ever heard.” Someone pointed out to her “the estate which had been purchased for the pope and where the pope was coming” as soon as Smith was elected. “They knew it for a fact.” Lillian Wald, a leader in the settlement house movement and New York’s pre-eminent authority on social work, despaired over “the organized bigotry, the like of which I have never seen. I feel as if some poison gas had spread over us and that our democracy will suffer from this for many years to come.”

Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special CollectionsCLICK TO ENLARGE

Smith lost that year, badly. Hoover got 58.2 percent of the votes, his opponent a dismal 40.8 percent. Even worse was the Electoral College; Hoover carried it by 444 to 87, winning 40 of the 48 states. The Roman Catholic candidate lost every western state and every Midwestern industrial state, even liberal ones like Wisconsin, while the solid Democratic South split over him. What really broke the governor’s heart, however, was that his own beloved home state thoroughly rejected him; New York went for Hoover, and outside of the five boroughs, only a scant four counties returned for Smith. Even among Gotham’s smart set, the “in” joke after Smith lost was that, upon learning of his defeat, the first thing he did was send a one-word telegram to the pope. It read, “Unpack.”

The problem with such sickness is that it ignores reality and facts, the most important of which is this: There is absolutely no evidence that a religious hierarchy, either that of Al Smith’s Roman Catholicism, of Mitt Romney’s Mormonism or of Representative Keith Ellison’s Muslim faith, has ever dictated these politicians’ positions on the issues or challenged their allegiance to the Constitution. Every American has a right to private beliefs, but we are not voting for which church someone goes to, or which movie he sees or what book she reads. The question should be the candidate’s outlook on the country’s problems and what policies he advocates in response. Those are what count, and they are weighty enough concerns.

A version of the article appeared in print on Dec. 11, 2011.

Robert A. Slayton is a professor of history at Chapman University and the author of “Empire Statesman: The Rise and Redemption of Al Smith.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following corrections, the second of which corrected errors in the first.

1. An earlier version of this article referred imprecisely to Hugh L. Carey, a former governor of New York. While Carey, who served from 1975 to 1982, was the second Catholic to be elected governor of New York State, he was not the second Catholic to hold the position. The printed correction also said that the second Catholic governor was Malcolm Wilson, who succeeded to the office when Nelson A. Rockefeller resigned in 1973 and lost to Carey in the 1974 election, but that is not the case.

2. An opinion essay on Dec. 11 about anti-Catholic prejudice during the 1928 presidential campaign of Alfred E. Smith referred imprecisely to Hugh L. Carey, and a correction in this space on Dec. 18 erroneously attributed a distinction to Mr. Smith. While Mr. Smith (who served from 1919 to 1920 and again from 1923 to 1928) was the first Catholic to be elected governor of New York State (and Mr. Carey, who served from 1975 to 1982, was the second), Mr. Smith was not the first Catholic governor. The correction also referred incorrectly to Malcolm Wilson, governor from 1973 to 1974. He was one of several Catholics who succeeded to the position without having been elected (including Martin H. Glynn, who served from 1913 to 1914 and was the state’s first Catholic governor). Neither Mr. Wilson nor Mr. Carey was the second Catholic governor; Mr. Smith was.

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Weekly pieces by the Op-Ed columnists Charles Blow and Ross Douthat, as well as regular posts from contributing writers like Thomas B. Edsall and Timothy Egan. This is also the place for opinionated political thinkers from all over the United States to make their arguments about everything connected to the 2012 election. Yes, everything: the candidates, the states, the caucuses, the issues, the rules, the controversies, the primaries, the ads, the electorate, the present, the past and even the future.